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This story appears courtesy of and with thanks to Dudley Delany, R.N., M.A., D.C.

Alfred Porsche was born in 1924 to godly German parents living in Poland. He grew up as part of a persecuted minority who, in 1939, welcomed the invading German army as liberators. Embracing the Nazi ideology, he joined the Hitler Youth Flying Group, where he learned to build and fly glider planes.

At his high school graduation party in 1942, he met a wonderful young woman named Edith, with whom he regularly corresponded and eventually fell in love.

Immediately after high school, Alfred enlisted in the Luftwaffe and, after appropriate training, became a navigator. It was only his glider training, however, that prevented him from being sent to the Russian front as an infantryman (so great was the need for ground troops). Instead, he was assigned to flights on damaged fighter planes that were being ferried from the front to a repair installation in East Prussia. Unfortunately, because some of the aircraft had fuel leaks and malfunctioning gauges, he was involved in six plane crashes. Each time, however, he walked away from the wreckage unharmed.

When the Luftwaffe ran out of planes in 1944, Alfred became a tank gunner. His unit was assigned to reclaim oil fields in Hungary that had been captured by the Russian Army. Their mission proved unsuccessful, however, and the Russians forced their retreat to a place in eastern Austria.

When the German army ran out of tanks in 1945, Alfred was assigned to the infantry and sent to the Russian front where, greatly outnumbered and outgunned, all but fifteen of his company were killed. When he was abandoned by his retreating comrades, he was found and imprisoned by a squad of German police who had orders to shoot without interrogation any German soldier found more than one mile from the front. They regarded Alfred as a deserter and prepared to execute him by firing squad, but continued Russian attacks prevented them from doing so. When a Russian bomb scored a direct hit on the farmhouse where he was being held, he managed to escape and rejoin his unit, but not before hiking in the dark on a road that was sown with land mines, and almost plunging to his death when he came upon a demolished bridge.

When Germany surrendered to the Allies in May of 1945, rather than fall into the hands of the Russians (who were known to execute prisoners), Alfred fled by truck and on foot 200 miles to the American Army, which at that time was located in Austria at a point just west of the Enns river.

When Alfred reached and attempted to cross the Enns river bridge, armed sentries told him that General Eisenhower gave explicit orders that no German troops were to cross the bridge. They were to surrender instead to the Russians. To Alfred, that was unthinkable. So, in full view of the sentries, he waded into the river and swam to the other side. Thankfully, they did not shoot.

Rather than being classifed as a "prisoner of war," however, Alfred was deemed "disarmed enemy forces." Unfortunately, the humane protocols of the Geneva Convention did not apply to individuals in the latter category. For three weeks, therefore, he was not fed any food, but lived instead like an animal on whatever vegetation and foliage he could find around the prison camp. Sick and emaciated, he came to the attention of General Patton on a surprise visit to the facility. Mercifully, this resulted in his being given food and, three months later, his freedom.

With the help of a kind and caring African-American soldier, Alfred got a good job in the 457th Quartermaster Laundry of the U.S. Army. Because the members of the company treated him with more courtesy and respect than his own countrymen, Alfred began to seriously question the Nazi doctrine of Aryan racial superiority.

In 1946, with the aid of the International Red Cross, he located Edith, who was then living in East Berlin. Bribing a railroad employee with cigarettes, he managed to visit her during Christmas of that year and, in 1947, they were married. When the Communist authorities rejected her request to move to West Germany to be with her husband, she escaped across the border with the help of a farmer who owned property on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

During his military career, Alfred narrowly escaped death on 24 separate occasions. Eventually coming to the realization that only Divine intervention could account for his miraculous survival, he returned to the God he had rejected as a Nazi Youth and, in the process, became a born-again Christian. His wife also soon followed suit.

Although they applied for emigration in 1947, it was not until 1955 (thanks to the Refugee Relief Act and sponsorship of a church in Pennsylvania) that the couple was able to settle in the U.S.

In their retirement many years later, they returned to Germany as missionaries.

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